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1GB of RAM instead of 2GB - Why???

I seen the first articles and pictures of the S3 after release today. I was confused with a few things at first, but overall I think it's a good device. My huge disappointment remains a hope that was broken with the official specifications becoming available: The S3 will have 1 gigabyte of RAM, rather than 2 like all speculations said it would.

Since people often ask "why would you need more than 1GB on a phone": Yes, I know that no one should normally run applications that take up to 1 gig of memory. But with how fast things are evolving, it's not impossible that future applications in the next months / years will get to that amount. Consider for instance that the S3 has a full HD screen, so a 3D game with high-poly meshes and large textures (512 x 512 or even 1024 x 1024) could be created for Android. The 1.4 GHz quad-core processor can run it smoothly, but due to low RAM (especially if you have something else running in the background) it will barely work. So I don't think some extra RAM is too little, nor that 2012 is too early for smartphones to enter the era of such hardware.

But it's not as much about urgently needing it as it is about hopes being let down on something I expected to be better. Everyone was talking that the S3 will have 2GB of RAM, some websites stating that a 1.5 GB version will also exist. Samsung never bothered to infirm this... on the contrary, many blogs stated that these specifications were official leaks from Samsung. Given that basically every webpage about the S3 I googled until yesterday said it will include more RAM than the S2, you can't accuse a bunch of noobs of spreading fake information either. The least they could have done is say "this rumor is untrue" and not get our hopes up. Right now I feel that Samsung slapped me in the face as an user of their Galaxy S, and I'm pretty pissed at them for this.

This also makes me see less of a reason to be excited over the quad-core 1.4 GHz CPU... added with the fact that memory is no improvement over the S2 since that also had 1GB. An application strong enough to use such a powerful processor will also use more memory. 1GB really doesn't seem like a match for such a processor in my knowledge (at least judging over computers, not sure about phones). So even my excitement over the powerful processor went away.

I really wonder what would have hurt Samsung to just respect the specs they leaked months ago and an not disappoint us with pointlessly adding lower hardware than we were expecting. Way to kill the fun But for now, I wonder what the odds are that Samsung might come back to this decision, and also release a 2GB version. They said a version of the S3 with a 64GB internal hard drive is coming, so maybe that will have the RAM we've been waiting for (or we'll have an S3 Plus). If not, I'm up for making a petition of sorts or mass-emailing Samsung to ask them for this, if other people consider it as important as I do.

I agree with you, this is their flagship phone and I expected to have more RAM than the S2. Yes, it perhaps doesn't need it now, but if 24 month contracts are generally now the norm in the mobile world, it's not a stretch to imagine in a 12 or 18 months, the extra RAM would come in very useful.

That said, I don't believe any of the leaks necessarily came from Samsung or anyone involved with them, I think the vast majority of them were probably created based on reasonable expectations by outsiders.

Well some time passed since the announcement, and the device is coming to my country next week. At this day, this remains a major (if not the only) disappointment for me regarding the S3. Although opinions as to whether "more than 1GB is needed or not" are varied, this is still something I looked forward to and upsets me the S3 doesn't have.

I'm curious if Samsung released any input on this critique at all. Has anyone from the S3 development team responded to those of us who are disappointed about the missing RAM? Also, have Samsung hinted or left any hope that a future update might introduce the extra memory (such as an S3 Plus)?

On the existing technical side, I have a related question. Does Android 4.0 and the partition system of the S3 allow the use of a paging file? So if the RAM fills up, the phone will use a virtual partition on the drive as RAM (even if it's slower). Not good for performance but at least usable with high-end apps. Anyone have any info on this?

Wow... really? (to both comments) If those models come with 2GB that is awesome... but if they removed the quad core CPU for a dual core one (which makes no sense at all) that's totally stupid. I'd probably need a way to merge the ram from one with the CPU from the other, which would require buying 2 phones and taking them to some specialist hacker, if it would even be possible :P Anyway this beings a good 2GB version closer to reality... shame it doesn't happen all the way :/